Is your cat keeping you up at night? Cat training is important for cats, not only for dogs.
Meeting my friend Christine today for lunch, and I am looking forward to seeing her. I saw her last,3 months ago when she was deeply in love with her Cat.
Sleepless Nights.
Melanie, I have not slept in weeks. My cat is keeping me up. I am going to kill my cat. Maybe not kill her, but there must be something I can do.
I can not go on like this it is killing me. Look at me I am a wreck. I look terrible. I haven’t slept in a month.
Those are the words of my friend Christine. She got herself a cat seven months ago, and now she has no idea what she should do as the cat keeps waking her up in the middle of the night a few times.
A Bored Cat is a handful.
Those are the first words when I met my friend Christine. I have to say she looked terrible her eyes had big bags with black shadows and she was quite stressed and nervous.
Calm down Christine was my words you can train your cat I said. Christine looked at me and said you are joking right? Cats are not trainable.
Melanie, you are joking, right? Have you seen cats that have a mind of their own?
Yes, I have 3 cats, and they do not keep me up at night. I trained them in a matter of 12 days.
It takes around 12 days to train any cat not to wake you up and go into a routine, so they sleep throughout the night.
No, I am not lucky I trained my cats, and it is not so difficult everyone can do it. It is easy. Cats can get easily bored.
Thousand have done it, and they thought they would never be able to train their cat.
So how do you train your cat so that she allows you to sleep through the night?
A cat that has a 24-hour clock is called the Circadian Rhythm. Naturally, your cat wants to get up at dusk and dawn.
What you can do is you can help your cat and guide her through her circadian rhythm. Believe it or not, you can reset the body clock of your cat.
But there are a couple of really important things you have to consider.
One very important thing is that you establish a daily rhythm, that you establish daily rituals that happen throughout the day. That helps to keep their body going.
One thing that is most important to what we are going to do now is your cat’s feeding schedule.
Remember something if you allow your cats to graze all day long if you allow them to eat whenever they want.
Not only do you not have the chance of affecting their behaviour even a little bit, but you are not allowing their body to process food naturally.
There are constantly in this arc of digestion. We don’t want that because then their energy is totally unpredictable for us.
So what should you do?
If you free feed, stop it. The next step is you will bring in meal times.
The real big change in the cat’s life is not met with nice things. You do not want to encourage bad behaviour, and by making rapid changes like that, you encourage it.
We’ll keep the dry food out, but then every day, you put less and less in there.
By the end of that first week, there is food down there, but your cat will not feel like there is anything missing.
But by an hour after you leave for work, your cat might have polished it off, and now your cat is waiting for a meal.
Rule of Thumb for feeding guidelines
# No longer than 6-8 hours between meals
# Feed 3 meals a day
# Then your cat’s energy is coming up to meet those meal times.
I can say out of the experience, within a week or two of instituting this meal time, your cat’s energy will come up to meet your schedule.
Step two is to try to get your cat to go to sleep when you go to sleep.
For example your bedtime is eleven o clock by 9.30 pm you should be feeding your cat the last meal. But you don’t want to do that in a vacuum.
A cat needs to hunt, catch, kill eat in nature. Right?
That means playtime. You have a nice chunky play right before that last meal.
Bring your cat to a boil during playtime. Get your cat worn out, and let them calm down for a few seconds again. All cats have the second wind, the third wind.
Cats are built for speed, not for distance. Bring them to a boil, let them come down, and bring your cat to a boil again, and now it is going to take less time for your cat to get worn out. Now less time, and now your cat is tired, right?
When your cat is worn out now ( hunt, catch, kill, eat ), feed their last meal of the day. What comes now after your cat has eaten, groomed and then slept? Now you can go to sleep.
Sleepless Nights with my Cat. The Hard Part for any Cat owner.
Now comes the hard part, and I mean the hard part. I know I had to do it, also …
A tip depends on how to determine your cat is put into the electric socket, the Feliway diffuser that keeps your cat calmer.
Now you got to do some serious work. Imagine it is 3′ o clock in the morning, and your cat is waking you up.
But you know your cat had a meal at 11 pm. You wore your cat down at 9.30 pm. Your Cat, you should be down for the count right now, but you are not.
Now comes the tough part, and I am laughing silently only because I know how ridiculously hard this is. You gonna hate me.
So what you got to do at 3 am in the morning when your cat is driving you crazy, you ignore her. … What …. yes, that is what I said.
“Yes, your heart is right you ignore your cat completely. “
A definite NO, you are not getting up and feeding your cat, or you walk around, go to the bathroom, come back again, you don’t play with your cat … NOTHING.
You ignore your cat completely.
Believe it or not, that is a payoff. Negative attention, positive attention, or any attention whatsoever is still attention.
You have to extinguish the payoff.
If you tell your cat night after night and again night after night, nothing is going to happen when your cat is doing that certain behaviour. That behaviour will stop.
So people, what that means is that for about 10 days to two weeks, it might be really, really long nights don’t kill me, but it will pay off.
If it goes past the 15th night, then send me an email. But I can tell you it won’t happen.
What is important for you to do is that this works.
# First thing you do is change your cat from a free feeder to a meal feeder
# Big change
# Next thing you do is feed in conjunction with the play
# Remember your cat’s energy moves with your energy
# Important to remember is that you try to merge your cat’s energy and your energy together.
Note1: Your energy, your cat’s energy, your cat’s clock, your clock, merge them together
Note 2: Then don’t forget the last meal of the day an hour and a half before you go to bed.
You going to let your cat hunt, catch, kill, eat and let the cat groom until you go to bed. Boom, then we get through the night, and the last step, the most important step, is to ignore your cat. You can do it.
You can affect your cat’s body clock, and that’s how you do it. That is how you sleep through the night.
When the 12 to 14 days are over, and you sleep through the night without being woken up by your cat, tap yourself on the shoulder and treat yourself to something nice.
Reward your cat with extra playtime and maybe some treats.
My friend Christine has trained her cat, and she is happy that she can sleep again at night. No more sleepless nights.
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Take care of yourself and take care of your cat.
No more sleepless nights with this secret cat training.
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Let me know how it works out
Melanie
It seems like there is some great info here but it is difficult to get your cat to follow.
Hi Tara
When a cat is used to keep you up at night it is hard to get sleep. Cats do need a routine and when they have a routine you need to change that, it will not be easy but it is possible. My Cat had a habit to wake me up and through the training of feeding and playing, she stopped after 36 days. It took her a bit longer but now she is fine and adjusted. I hope you can get your cat to follow you.
Download our free ebook “for the love of cats”
All yours Melanie